About

Emerald Onion is a Seattle-based 501(c)3 not-for-profit and encrypted-transit internet service provider. We work to protect privacy, anonymity, access to information, and free speech online. To further that mission, we operate high-capacity, fully open Tor exit routers with connectivity to the Seattle Internet Exchange. Emerald Onion envisions a world where access and privacy are the defaults. If we do not have human rights online, we will not have them offline, either.

XanaduRegio is an information security engineer. He served in the U.S. Navy administering classified Command, Control, Communication, Computers & Intelligence (C4I) systems. XanaduRegio also volunteers with the Seattle Privacy Coalition.

Will is a research fellow at the University of Michigan studying Internet security and access. His work includes Satellite, a project scanning the internet for DNS censorship, and Onionproxy for routing public email to location-hidden services. A Seattle native, Will’s previous experiences have included teaching skiing, living in China, working on the Gmail and Jigsaw teams at Google, teaching Computer Science in Pyongyang, and playing with fire.

Advisory Board

John is the lead developer of Ricochet, an infrastructure-less chat program built on the Tor network and focused on ease of use. John has contributed to Tor’s Onion Service specification and development. He is otherwise unremarkable and enjoys his anonymity, and lack of hassling at borders.

Paul is CEO of PreOS Security Inc and is a board member for the League of Professional System Administrator, a nonprofit professional association for the advancement of the practice of system administration from 2015 through 2017. Paul has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute obtained in 1998. He has been a UNIX & Linux system administrator and wearer of many other IT hats since 1996. More recently he has managed a few sysadmins while still racking the occasional server. In 2016, Paul ventured into a firmware security startup to help sysadmins keep their systems safe from new threats.

Thomas is a British independent security researcher and Linux Systems Administrator. He has been involved in holding large corporations to account for their data security and has been a staple for journalists reporting on information security breaches. Thomas has been operating Tor exit routers for more than 8 years and has been fighting against the ever-expanding U.K. surveillance laws for as long.

Shawn is an offensive and defensive security researcher, with over a decade of experience in the field. Primarily on the defensive side, Shawn co-founded HardenedBSD and sits on the core team. Shawn’s most well-known offensive research is libhijack, a post-exploitation tool that makes runtime process infection easy on FreeBSD. An avid fan of Tor, he runs a public relay on a Raspberry Pi 3 running HardenedBSD. In fact, his home is wired for Tor. Plug in a device and all its traffic magically goes through Tor!